Another Day, Another Supreme Court Power Grab That Will Kill People
Get ready to sort ‘em all out, God!
On Thursday, by a vote of 5-4, the Supreme Court of the United States of America ruled in NIH v. Public Health Association et al. that the regime can terminate $783 million in grants for lifesaving research at the National Institutes of Health, the largest public funding source for biomedical research in the world. Congress had voted to fund the grants, but after DOGE’s AI searches for keywords like “gender,” “justice,” “marginalized,” “climate,” “DEI objectives,” “gender identity,” or “COVID–19,” the regime went on an impounding spree, and now 1,700 grants have been cut, and more than 3,200 are on the chopping block. The Supreme Court has never smelled some power that it did not want to grab and hand to Dear Leader President Donald J. Trump!
PREVIOUSLY!
And then the Big Beautiful Blowjobs for Billionaires Act would cut off as much as $18 billion from the NIH’s budget for the next fiscal year, about 40 percent of its total funding, too.
We’re in danger! Disease-wise everywhere, and also job-wise, especially in Maryland, where the NIH employs 18,000 researchers, one in 10 workers is a federal employee, and Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland system are among the top 5 biggest employers.
And so now the Court is letting a certain pair of cankles get away with hate-driven cuts, again, this time thanks to cult handmaiden Justice Amy Coney Barrett voting with the court’s four worst fascist enablers. (Though Justice John Roberts did not join them, this time.) The question before the court was if the regime violated the Administrative Procedures Act by not following any administrative procedures whatsoever, and the Constitution by cutting out Congress.
And like everything else that the Court has been fixing for Dear Leader lately, a lower court already shot him down. Just as with migrant humanitarian protections, and kicking transgender soldiers out of the military, mass firing of thousands of federal employees, and “Pride Puppy” on an elementary school bookshelf. All that shit used to be well-established law! But precedent means nothing to these people. They went off the rails with Dobbs and presidential immunity and then never looked back. And they don’t have any respect for the judges below them, either. They are the SUPREMES, so fuck all y’all!
In June, US District Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, ordered the administration to restore the NIH funding. “You’re bearing down on people of color because of their color,” Young said, according to a lawyer present. “Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”
Oh, my sweet (thousand-year-old) summer child. And then the First Circuit Court of Appeals declined to temporarily put Young’s order on hold too. And so the regime went emergency-crying to the Supreme Court that it would be harmed forever if it had to fund studying why Black women are increasingly dying in childbirth.
You’ll also recall in April in Department of Ed. v. California the Supremes let the administration yank away $65 million in teacher training grants from eight states, money that Congress had already designated. And it was their own shitass “jurisdiction” part of the ruling that Justice Neil Gorsuch cited in this case. “Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” he sniffed.
They are the precedent now, and it is going to take this country decades to get out from under what they have done. Which is the Federalist Society weirdo/Heritage Foundation zeroes’ whole MO, to wreck the place and leave the road covered with burning wreckage and nails.
At least we have Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent to let us all know we aren’t alone in noticing all of this. Some select bits:
For a cautionary tale about lawmaking on the emergency docket, look no further than this newest iteration. By today’s order, an evenly divided Court neuters judicial review of grant terminations by sending plaintiffs on a likely futile, multivenue quest for complete relief. Neither party to the case suggested this convoluted procedural outcome, and no prior court has held that the law requires it. But, in the view of the deciding vote, California compels this conclusion.
This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.
In the footnote, KBJ went after Amy Bony Carrot in particular:
JUSTICE BARRETT’s separate opinion proves the point. It injects final agency action into the case as an additional potential barrier to relief, suggesting that the only challenge the order leaves open—the one to agency guidance—is in fact foreclosed by a doctrine the Government does not press.
“You could ask a government agency to help you. Ha ha, just kidding, we already said you can’t do that either!”
Nope, courts aren’t going to save us.
It’s all so heavy, especially if one has minor children or grandchildren who will be coming up in this world. Even white and straight ones. Advising a kid to study to be a doctor or a lawyer, or get a stable job with the government, used to be easy advice to give. Now it’s a question if/how those jobs will even exist. Or colleges! Or whether the kids will even make it to college without dying from some preventable disease first!
Sorry, we are having a moment. Time to find our body and fix our face. Put on some soothing tunes. Look for the helpers. Justice is an arc, and all that.
[SCOTUSBlog / Washington Post gift link]
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All this time, a system built on agreements, traditions, guidelines, etc. Sloppy wording going back nearly 250 years (though of course much of it was written up, sloppily, in the meantime).
Understandings that past precedents will guide current and future policy.
Works kinda OK as long as everyone is operating in good faith.
For me personally, back to about 1972 when I was 6 years old, I've been asking, "What if everyone is not operating in good faith?"
I got shushed for that, and sometimes still am. People have scolded me less harshly over the past 9 years; much less so over the past 9 months.
But there are still people who are too terrified to name what they see. I can't sympathize, and I'm running out of empathy now.
When we come out on the other side of this shitstorm, we have to make some hard rules with enforcement mechanisms. None of this, "If the President breaks the law refer it to the DOJ" nonsense that wouldn't satisfy a toddler.
I hope she has a strong and loyal security detail